Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

Everything You Need To Know About LinkedIn Endorsements

Since LinkedInLinkedIn introduced its endorsements feature more than a year ago, we’ve all received endorsements for skills we didn’t know we had from people we didn’t know we knew.

Though I think I could do a good job of writing about food, I’ve never done it, so I was mystified when five people endorsed me for “food writing.” Another mystery endorsement came from someone who checked off “celebrity,” whatever that means.

Should I just let those endorsements stand, assuming any positive mark on my profile will help me? Or is there some way I can edit endorsements to make them reflect better what I do? What should I do when I get an endorsement out of the blue from someone whose name doesn’t ring a bell? Should I be in touch with, and endorse the people who endorse me?

For advice, I talked to a half dozen career coaches and executive recruiters, and to a spokeswoman for LinkedIn, Julie Inouye. This is what I’ve gathered:

1. LinkedIn endorsements are good for us and can lead to recommendations. Endorsements make it easy to put in a positive word for a connection without going to the trouble of writing a recommendation. But if you need more recommendations on your profile, consider asking an endorser if he or she would be able to write you a recommendation. The endorsement is a good starting point because you know the endorser thinks highly of your work.

2. Only first-degree connections can endorse you. If it seems that your endorsements are coming from people with whom you’re barely in touch, that’s because you have expanded your connections to include people you don’t know well. This raises one of the tensions of establishing a strong LinkedIn presence: The more people you’re connected to, the greater your reach and the more possibilities you have to get help reaching out to a potential employer, client or consultant. On the other hand, there is a school of thought, echoed by Inouye, that says you should only connect with people whom you know well and who could, in fact, endorse your skills and whom you could endorse. The fact is that most of us have first-degree connections with some people who don’t directly know our work—family, friends, colleagues or former colleagues outside our department. Expect some endorsements that seem like they are out of left field.

3. You can, and should, hide some endorsements. It’s not possible to delete an endorsement but you can hide it so that no one but you can see it. Go to the pull-down menu at the top of the screen and under “profile,” click “edit profile.” When you scroll to the “skills and expertise” section, you will see a pencil icon. Click that and you will see an option to “manage endorsements.” A box will pop up that shows all the people who endorsed you. If you have an endorsement from, say, a family friend who has never worked with you, uncheck the box next to that person’s name and you will hide that endorser. Likewise if someone has endorsed you for a skill you don’t have, you can click “add and remove,” and delete the skill. (I did this for “celebrity.”)

4. List your skills. Back in Feb. of 2011, LinkedIn introduced the “skills and experience” feature. Many of us have not gotten around to filling this out. It’s worth doing because you want people endorsing you to check off the skills you deem most important. Pick at least 10 skills. Inouye explains that endorsements will only appear on your profile for your top 10 skills. In the same field where you are editing your endorsements, you can type a skill into the box. For instance, I put in “writing” and I had a choice of nine different types of writing, from “news writing” to “technical writing.” When I clicked on “news writing,” I got another 20 related skills, to choose from, including “investigative reporting” and “business journalism.” You could obviously spend a lot of time on this. It pays to take at least 15 minutes to list the skills you think are central to your work.

5. You don’t have to reciprocate, but it can be a good idea. You don’t need to respond to a distant connection you haven’t spoken to in a decade, but if you get an endorsement from a close colleague, it makes sense to reciprocate. The best way to do this is to go to your connection’s profile page. Click the grey “endorse” box under their name and a blue box will appear at the top with a list of skills, which you can check off. I recently endorsed the skills of a former colleague whose work I admire, and he wrote me a short, personal note of thanks, which I appreciated. The endorsement feature offers an opportunity to do some networking either online or in person. If you receive an endorsement, consider asking the endorser to meet for coffee or go out for a drink. Online networking is great but in-person meetings are even better.

5. Seek endorsements from people who know your work well. If you’re working on a project with someone or you have an ongoing relationship with a colleague or boss, ask them to endorse your work. It’s best to do this in person or through a short personal note.

6. Don’t worry about whether endorsements affect the capacity of potential employers to search for your profile. Officially, LinkedIn does not reveal the details of how its software makes it possible for potential employers or clients to search on LinkedIn profiles. But I have good reason to believe that endorsements do not affect LinkedIn search results.

7. Recruiters don’t care about endorsements. I talked to four recruiters who all said that recommendations did not much affect how they perceived a candidate one way or the other. “It’s cheap and dirty,” says Neil E. Peek, a senior recruiter at Brocade, a network equipment company in San Jose, Calif. “It’s no skin in the game for the person making the endorsement.” He adds that it’s “nice to see” on a profile, “but it doesn’t have any substance to it.” For Peek, recommendations carry much more weight. Steven Raz, of Cornerstone Search Group in Parsippany ,N.J., an executive search firm that specializes in the pharmaceutical and biotech fields, says that while the concept is good, endorsements have already become “a little meaningless because everyone is endorsing everyone for everything.” Raz agrees with Peek that recommendations are much more important.

8. Don’t ignore endorsements. Though many of us may feel burdened by having to manage our social media presence, there is no question that LinkedIn is the leader in professional social networking. Recruiters and hiring managers may not care much about endorsements at this point, but it’s easy to imagine a time when they will. If you’re applying for a sales job, for instance, and your competitors all have 50-100 endorsements from clients and colleagues, while you have zero, that could hurt your chances. Though it’s tempting to ignore endorsements, it doesn’t take much time to manage them. They can strengthen your ties with your connections and make your profile even stronger.

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